Theological Critique of Multi-Site: What Exactly Is a “Church”?
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In your mind, what are the necessary elements which must be present for a group of Christians to become a local church? I assume you don’t think that three Christians throwing a Frisbee at the park constitutes a local church. So what would?
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What Is this Thing, Anyway? A Multi-Site Taxonomy
By Greg Gilbert
Congregational? Presbyterian? Episcopalian? Presbygational? Conbypalian? Epigregyterian? I've heard them all (even made up a few myself).
"Its just as congregational as any other church," some argue. "We have a meeting of the whole church every quarter."
"No, it's Presbyterian" others say. "You have a group of pastors that makes decisions for multiple congregations."
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The Alternative: Why Don't We Plant?
Instead of adding new services or new sites when the numbers grow, why not simply plant new churches? The only reason not to plant churches stems from one of two failures: either the church has failed to do the discipling work of raising up more elders and pastors, or the church has decided to accommodate celebrity and consumeristic culture. Let me start with the second failure.
ACCOMODATING CULTURE
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Nine Reasons I Don't Like Multi-site Churches
I am 35 years old. I have up to four laptops at any given time connected to my home wireless network and a data phone permanently attached to my pocket. I use Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, shoot home videos in HD, my X-Box Halo gamer rank is 31, I was among the first to own a Wii, and I have a Second Life account. So my fears of the multi-site church movement are not technological; they are principled.
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Historical Critique of Multi-Site: Not Over My Dead Body
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Congregationalists and Baptists have spilled a lot of ink during the past five centuries arguing about church government. Whether they've been fending off Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, or those within their own ranks, Congregationalists and Baptists have dug deep into both Scripture and their inkwells in order to discover, declare, and argue for a biblical church polity.[1]
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Exegetical Critique of Multi-Site: Disassembling the Church?
Praise God for our brothers and sisters in multi-site churches who are reaching their communities with the gospel of Jesus Christ! Assenters and dissenters to this approach alike should be able to say with Paul, "What then? Only that…Christ is proclaimed; and in this I rejoice" (Phil. 1:18).[1]
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Clouds on the Horizon
The Village Church has been a "multi-site church" since 2007. We went in that direction reluctantly and with trepidation. I dont have the space in this article to unpack all the ways we wrestled with the scriptures, tested our ecclesiology, and, ultimately, believed the Lord was leading us to go multi-site. In this article I will focus on our thought process in moving in this direction and then state some of the problems that we believe might be in the future for us a multi-site church.
A DISCUSSION ABOUT METHODOLOGY, NOT THEOLOGY
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A Pastor Defends His Multi-Site Church
By J.D. Greear
In 2005 our congregation moved to a multi-site strategy for spatial necessity. God was graciously bringing to our doors more people than we could handle. We were doing as many morning services as we could in our rented school facility, and were having to turn people away. So we opened another campus 3 miles down the road, where I preached between our other services at the main campus.
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